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Notes from the Editor

Hey, kids!

We have a solid issue this month, featuring double contributions by Janet Terra and the inimitable Alyce Watson. In addition, Ken Lewis Sr. revises a program originally published in the NL103 zip archive; while Brad Moore provides number 9 in his series of highly popular beginning programming tutorials. Nally concludes with another graphics program, a programming fixation which, under other circumstances, might merit professional counseling.

Alyces first contribution is the third in a series of articles discussing how to use the popular library, QCard32.dll. Have you been wondering how to shuffle cards, deal them face down, and match them? Wonder no more. Alyce provides a demo program with her article. Also, look in the archive of this newsletter, nl124.zip, for wav files required to accompany the demo.

New readers may not know this, but Alyce provided some of the original LB programming technology to display and manipulate sprites back in the LB version 1.x days! This technology was such a hit that Carl incorporated it into later versions of the Liberty BASIC language. Is it any wonder, then, that Alyce is the sprite expert? She demonstrates this once again with another Sprite Byte^TM article. In this one, Alyce discusses the gaming code for shooting multiple missiles. Thanks a bunch, Alyce.

In Janet Terra's first contribution, Programming a Word Game, she helpfully identifies a number of public domain word lists, a requirement for games where users must supply words. (Nice research, Janet!) Janet also discusses the use of public domain dictionaries which, while perhaps not as easy to use as plain word lists, can still do the job. Keep reading, because she'll share Norman's code for finding all the permutations of a set of letters. Don't forget to look for Janet's Anagrams.bas in the newsletter's zip archive. It's much more fun than Janet modestly implies!

Janet's second contribution is a wrap-up of the The Liberty BASIC Maven Puzzle Contest! Thanks for organizing that, Janet, and thanks to all those who participated!

Frequent contributor Ken Lewis Sr. provides a revised version of his program to add an icon to the Taskbar. The original version can be found in the archive, sysTray.zip, nested within the archive of newsletter 103, nl103.zip. The current version has been tested with Win98SE, and WinXP. Ken's cool program provides code which will allow programmers to make their programs vanish from the screen, and appear as an icon in the taskbar. By clicking on the icon, the user can restore the program to it's active state. Job well done, Ken!

The hard work and craftsmanship is easy to spot in Brad Moore's newest contribution, Beginning Programming Series IX. Brad begins with a nice introduction to Freeform, a summary so handy that it might be worth bookmarking. He follows that with a thorough discussion of the code required to write a simple calculator program. New programmers will love this one! Excellent job, Brad!

Nally closes this issue with his article, Rendering Solid Objects - The Four Technical Challenges. Rather than discuss the code of his demo program, Lame Solid Imager, Nally elects to identify the four technical challenges that a programmer must address in order to render solid objects using this particular method. That way, the ambitious programmer out there can write something much more fancy and efficient than LSI. Nonetheless, LSI is provided in the zip archive for this newsletter.

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Whew! Putting Newsletter 124 in the books is a happy time for me, kids. Alyce said that if I could publish it by September 6th, I'd get an extra 'Nilla brand vanilla wafer this month! Gimme twelve ounces of milk, and this country boy's in heaven!

Liberty BASIC Newsletter 124 is now secure. Nally out.

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